Bill
Clinton’s warReviewing the attack on Yugoslavia
(urgedby Hillary) and other Clinton acts of war—a study of arbitrary power & media
servility

Congress
could have impeached Bill for farworse crimes than those it charged him with

A WALL history & commentary

Early
in U.S. history, it was firmly established that Congress made the decision to
fight a war. The Constitution assigned that grave decision to the national
legislative body so it wouldn’t be made often or frivolously, in the manner of
Old World kings. Nowadays, the United States wages wars constantly, on the whim
of a single person.

Why
does a president commit those unconstitutional acts? There are the official
reasons, for which he (or she?) gets free time on television networks and which
make the headlines. Then there is the truth.

To illustrate
pure, presidential war-making, in which Congress and law played no direct role,
take the actions of Bill Clinton. The Clintons may be back in the White House
next year, albeit in reversed roles. In any event, Bill’s deeds have lessons
for Americans. Had we learned them, maybe no U.S. forces would be fighting in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere.

The main lesson: Tragedy ensues when one person can
decide war. The decision may hinge on personal or other irrelevant motives. To
illustrate, we review chronologically seven of Clinton’s acts of war.

Iraq.
Clinton’s first bombing of Baghdad, on June 26, 1993— killing eight
civilians—was supposedly punishment for an attempt by Saddam Hussein to kill
George Bush (senior). Kuwaiti police had arrested seventeen men, claimed to
find a bomb in a car from Iraq, and said an Iraqi “confessed” to an
assassination plot. On the witness stand, he declared he was innocent and
signed because police beat him.

Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker (Nov. 1, 1993) that
Clinton had been mired in controversy over his cautious Bosnia policy and White
House staffers advised that “bombing Baghdad would improve Clinton’s political
standing at home and his diplomatic standing in the Middle East.” Past and present
intelligence officials told Hersh the acceptance of
the Kuwaiti allegation was based on “conflicting and dubious evidence.”

Bosnia.Amid
a civil war among Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, came two bloody
explosions in Sarajevo’s main market, in 1994 and 1995. Supposedly in response
to the latter blast, Clinton and NATO promptly launched a heavy bombing
campaign against Serbs—without considering the evidence. (It was ambiguous and
did not point to any party as culpable, Professors Steven Burg and Paul Shoup wrote in The
War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,1999.) Clinton later sent 20,000 U.S. troops to
Bosnia to join NATO “peacekeepers.”

By
showing toughness, he could further his re-election after being called
wishy-washy and anti-military. One writer believed that Clinton, in expectation
of cheap oil and huge aircraft sales, intentionally advanced Saudis’ desire for
an Islamic country in Europe.

Iraq
again.Clinton
bombed Iraqi air defenses—and some civilians—on September 3 and 4, 1996, to make
Saddam Hussein “pay a price” for sending troops to Kurdish Iraq. (Hussein said
he was quelling strife between factions.) U.S. presidential voting was two
months off.

Afghanistan
& Sudan. The media covered Clinton’s sex scandal heavily.
Widely suspected of lying about his association with the intern Monica
Lewinsky, he was advised to come clean to get the public on his side. On August
17, 1998, in grand jury testimony and a television address, he abandoned months
of denial and admitted “inappropriate” contact with her and having misled the
public and his own wife. A poll taken immediately after the speech showed that
a favorable rating of 60 percent five days earlier had dropped to 40 percent.

On
August 20 Clinton bombed Afghanistan and the Sudan. The news upstaged the
Lewinsky scandal. Clinton claimed he was fighting “terrorists.” But it soon came
out that one of his supposed terrorist targets was the Sudan’s only medicinal
factory, indicating haste in planning the raids.

Two
senators and two representatives questioned Clinton’s timing and credibility,
and the Los Angeles Times asked
whether the movie Wag the Doghad
come to life. In the movie, a Hollywood producer was hired to fabricate a war
to distract the public from a presidential sex scandal. But Clinton’s acts of
war were real.

Iraq once more. In early December 1998, the biggest news concerned
impending impeachment proceedings in Congress. The question of Clinton’s
impeachment was scheduled for House floor debate on Thursday, the 17th. Voting
appeared likely the next day.

On
Wednesday, the 16th, Clinton again bombed Iraq, falsely claiming it was not
cooperating with UN inspectors. Consequently the House postponed the
impeachment question for a day and Iraq took over the headlines. Killing a
couple of hundred Iraqis, the bombings continued until impeachment was voted
September 19.

Yugoslavia. For three months, peace talks went on in Rambouillet, France, over strife between Yugoslavia and
ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Other nations,
including the U.S., participated.

Family House, Nis, Yugoslavia, July, 1999

What brought matters to a head, in March 1999, probably had less to do
with European troubles than with two news stories troubling Bill Clinton. One
dealt with an Arkansas woman’s allegation that he raped her twenty-one years
earlier when he was attorney general of Arkansas. Another concerned allegations
in the Republican Congress of Chinese theft of U.S. nuclear weapons secrets and
inaction by Clinton, alleged recipient of campaign donations from China. A
House committee had prepared a classified report on the matter; a Senate panel
planned an investigation.

In Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Clinton’s envoy, Richard
Holbrooke, delivered an ultimatum to the president, Slobodan Milosevic. To
avoid war, the latter had to sign an agreement letting NATO troops occupy all
Yugoslavia, then comprising Serbia and Montenegro. A day or two later, on March
23, Holbrooke forwarded the go-ahead for war to NATO’s secretary general in
Brussels.

Freedom Bridge over the Danube, Novi Sad, April, 1999

The
attack came March 24, wiping the allegations about Clinton off the TV news and
front pages. U.S. and other NATO forces spent the next eleven weeks hitting
Yugoslavs with air-launched missiles, bombs, and bullets. Mrs.
Clinton may have influenced Bill’s decision. On March 21, when he was undecided
about attacking Yugoslavia, she phoned and “I urged him to bomb” (as quoted by
biographer Gail Sheehy in Hillary’s
Choice, p. 345).

Throughout
the country, the death toll exceeded 2,000 civilians; the civilian injury toll reached
at least three times that many, let alone casualties among soldiers. Why the
mass killings? Bill Clinton said they were to stop mass killings in Kosovo,
which had been going on for a long time. But if they were such an old story,
why did he choose the time he did to start a war? Could this attack and the
previous three attacks all have served as distractions from scandal?

The genocide tale

The official line was that the war
was humanitarian, a “moral imperative,” to stop massacres by President Slobodan
Milosevic and men. Five days before attacking, Clinton pictured shootings of
Albanians: “Innocent men, women, and children were taken from their homes to a
gully, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with gunfire.”

In January of 1999, 45 bodies had
appeared in a ditch in the village of Racak, Kosovo,
Serbia. Without evidence, U.S. diplomat William Walker, head of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said the dead, many
mutilated, were Albanian Kosovo civilians murdered by Serbs.

The number of victims was inflated to
100,000 by both David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador at
large, and William Cohen, secretary of defense; to 225,000, by Scheffer later; and as high as 500,000 by the Department of
State. Scheffer called it “genocide.”

Later,
Geoff Hoon, British defense minister, said some 10,000
ethnic Albanians had been killed in over 100 massacres.The Associated Press repeated the toll,
without explaining its origin. Likewise The New York Times,
getting “fresh reports each day of newly discovered bodies and graves.” It ran 80
stories referring to mass graves in Kosovo. Rumors, which the Times and National Public Radio
repeated, had bodies being disposed of at the Trepca
mine: in shafts, in acid, or in a furnace. Clinton and others compared
Milosevic to Hitler. Such talk stirred hatred of Serbs.

Unlike American media, which swallowed the official
government line whole, their European counterparts questioned the massacre
allegations. Doubters included France’s Le
Figaro and Le Monde and Germany’s
Berliner Zeitung,
which reported (March 13, 1999) that several governments wanted Walker out
of OSCE; they had statements from OSCE monitors that the Racak
bodies were mostly of guerrillas killed in battle.

A year later (March 12, 2000) The Sunday Times of London reported that
Walker had
been covertly helping the CIA push NATO into war. Also promoting war in 1999
was the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Aiming at convincing the U.S. and NATO to
attack the Serbs and split the province from Yugoslavia, it publicized the 45
bodies.

The European Union hired a team of Finnish
forensic pathologists to investigate. Their report remained secret for two
years. U.S. media mostly ignored its release in 2001, except for a brief story
by United Press International.

The findings coincided, not with a massacre,
but with a two-day battle between Yugoslav police and Albanian guerrillas.
Nobody could tell if the 45 were civilians, where they lived, or where they
died. Only one body showed signs of shooting at short range,
only one was that of a woman, and only one was plainly juvenile. Shots
had been fired into different bodily parts, from different directions. Gunpowder
residue on the hands of 37 indicated firearm use.

AYugoslav
pathologist also examined the bodies and, like the Finns, found no massacre,
but few listened. In mid June 1999 the FBI sent a team to investigate two
alleged grave sites and returned home with nothing to say. French forensic
experts, looking for a grave said to have about 150 bodies, found none and no
evidence of bodies in the mine. A Spanish team, expecting 2,000 bodies, found
187, mostly in individual graves and showing signs of war deaths but not of murder
or torture.

A Le Monde reporter and an Associated Press crew saw bodies one day
that they had not seen the day before. There were no pools of blood, no shell
casings. Evidently the KLA had gathered the victims of the gun battle, made
sure they were all in civilian clothes, and put them in the ditch. Walker then announced
they were “executed.”

One whopper, told early in the war
by Jamie Rubin, State Department spokesman, had 100,000 Albanians imprisoned at
the stadium in Pristina, capital of Kosovo. He got it from the KLA. Such
prominent media as Associated Press, ABC News, and PBS reported it as fact. Only
a reporter for the French Press Agency thought of going to the stadium and
looking. He found it empty with no sign of recent habitation.

As
far as I know, no news media mentioned the U.S. treaties prohibiting aggressive
war—the best known being the United Nations Charter—or the U.S. treaties
embodying humanitarian law, such as:

The Geneva Convention
(IV) from fifty years earlier: “Civilian hospitals … may in no circumstances
be the object of attack … .” (Article 18).

The Hague Convention on Laws of War
on Land, 1907, prohibiting, e.g., treacherous killing and weapons
that are poisoned or designed to cause unnecessary suffering (Article 23) and
the attack or
bombardment of undefended communities, dwellings, or other buildings (Article 25).

The 1977 Protocol Additional to the
Geneva Convention of 1949. It bans attacks on
civilians or indiscriminate attacks that harm civilians or civilian objects
along with military targets; violations are war crimes. (The U.S. signed the
protocol; although the Senate never voted on it, Amnesty International says
international law regards it as binding on all countries in the conduct of war.
The U.S. Army Field Manual tends to support that view: “Customary international
law prohibits the launching of attacks [including bombardment] against either
the civilian population or individual civilians as such.”)

The Los Angeles Times repeatedly ran front-page stories on attacks against civilians,
like these two:Low-flying planes bomb a
Serbian bridge, toppling cars into the water and killing at least nine
civilians. When people rush to offer aid, the planes return to kill
them too (May 31). A refugee camp is bombed (April 15):

Many of the refugees in Korisa were asleep when explosions sprayed shrapnel and flames
everywhere, survivors said … .

At
least a dozen children were among the dead. An infant buttoned up in terrycloth sleepers
lay among the corpses that filled the local morgue.

Another child was incinerated in the fire that
swept through the camp. The body was
still lying on the ground Friday morning, beside that of an adult, in the
middle of a tangle
of farmers’ tractors and wagons that were still burning 12 hours after the
attack.

That
attack inspired an editorial in The New
York Times, “Grisly Accident in Kosovo” (April 16), which said the purpose
of NATO’s bombing was “to stop the killing and reverse
the expulsion of Kosovo’s persecuted ethnic Albanians.” Yet NATO bombs killed
72 of them. “But as President Clinton rightly noted yesterday, accidents are
inseparable from war, and it would be a greater tragedy to slacken the
bombardment or unduly restrict the military target list.” It follows (as I
wrote the Times) that
to cease the killing of civilians would be “a greater tragedy” than to keep
killing them. “Shades of Orwell! We kill to oppose
killing. To stop taking lives is tragedy.” (My letter was not published.)

Tolerating homicide

Consider Clinton’s statement that such
“accidents” are inseparable from war. If that is so, then how can war be
tolerated? Indeed, the U.S. government (under President Calvin Coolidge) and
other governments sought to end it in 1928, when the killing of civilians was less
acceptable. They made the Pact of Paris, or Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact,
renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. It was invoked at the
trials of Nazi and Japanese war criminals and remains in effect.

Anyhow, if Clinton knew his bombings
would kill civilians, could their killings be truly called accidental—as
opposed to homicidal? That editorial alluded to a Times story headed, “Civilian Deaths Inevitable in Warfare, Clinton
Says” (April 16). Lacking justification under national or international law, he
could have justifiably been tried for more than perjury and obstruction of
justice, the charges that the House of Representatives impeached him on in
1998.

Charges could have included violation of the
humanitarian laws cited above, as well as waging of aggressive war in violation
of Kellogg-Briand, the United Nations Charter, and the North Atlantic Treaty.
The UN Charter says (Article 2), “All members shall settle their international
disputes by peaceful means” and refrain from “the threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state….” The
North Atlantic Treaty accepts those UN provisions.

Moreover, Clinton usurped Congress’s sole
authority under the Constitution to decide whether to go to war (Article I,
Section 8), and he persisted even after specific rebuffs by the House of
Representatives on April 28, 1999. They included a 427–2 vote against declaring
war on Yugoslavia and rejection of the bombing by a 213 tie vote. Next day, The New York Times wrongly stated that
Clinton “does not need the House’s moral support to continue air strikes.”
Writings of the founding fathers confirm that the Constitution authorized
Congress alone to initiate war. (See: “What the Founders
of the U.S.A. Wrote….” on this website)

Advocates
of war crimes

War pushers at the home of “All the News That’s Fit
to Print,” besides editorial writers, included two New York Times columnists who advocated in effect the very crimes
that they blamed Serbs for.

“Let’s see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a
chance,” Thomas Friedman wrote, using a slogan he would recycle for every new
war (April 6). He went on (April 23): “Every power grid, water pipe, bridge,
road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war
with the Serbian nation.”

Anthony Lewis wrote that critics of the
bombings should “think again about which side they are on” (May 29). He said a
Serbian commander in Bosnia seven years earlier ordered widespread burning of
Sarajevo. “That should be remembered when Serbs today describe
themselves as victims…. NATO air attacks have killed Serbian civilians. That is
regrettable. But it is a price that has to be paid when a nation falls in
behind a criminal leader.”

So because a Serbian officer once committed an
atrocity, the Serbian people deserve to die? Note that when it comes to war,
notions of collective guilt and collective punishment tend to replace American
principles of individual responsibility and presumption of innocence.

Bill
O’Reilly, on the Fox News Channel, also favored what amounted to war crimes
against the Serbian people (April 26): “Destroy
their infrastructure, totally destroy it. Any target is OK … . I would level
that country so that there would be nothing moving—no cars, no trains, nothing… .
The Serb people should be held accountable for this dictator.”

In Time magazine,
Bruce Nelen objected to the use of relatively light
bombs, because it was not certain that a target would be destroyed in one
attack (April 5). “And if the pilot has to
come back, that increases the risk to him in order to lessen the risk of
civilians on the ground—a kind of Disneyland idea of customer service that
rankles many war fighters at the Pentagon.”

The
Pentagon apparently paid heed to commentators like those, who advocated in
effect stepping up the killing of civilians. Toward the end of the war, there appeared
to be no restrictions on bombing. In an op-ed article in The New York Times, ex-President Jimmy Carter, wrote (May 27):

[O]ur destruction
of civilian life has now become senseless and excessively brutal … . As the
American-led force has expanded targets to inhabited
areas and resorted to the use of anti-personnel cluster bombs, the result has been damages
to hospitals, offices and residences of a half-dozen ambassadors,
and the killing of hundreds of innocent civilians and an untold number of
conscripted troops … . Missiles and bombs are now concentrating on the
destruction of bridges, railways, roads, electric power, and fuel and fresh
water supplies … . The ends don’t always justify the means.

Another
civilian target was Radio Television Serbia, where bombs killed 16 to 20
(reports differed) editorial, technical, and office personnel on April 23. The
attackers called their bombing accidental. But nearly five years later, I heard
Wesley Clark,the war’s topgeneral,
admit that it was intentional. A reporter for Pacifica Radio, Jeremy Scahill, had questioned him and recorded his response.

U.S.
news media said little about that destruction of media of speech and press.
Most accepted the president’s “air campaign” or “strikes” (two popular
euphemisms for the aerial killing).

Unfit to print

In their zeal for war and scorn for Serbs,
writers did not necessarily let logicalconsistency stand in their way. Stacy
Sullivan in The New Republic raised
“disturbing questions about the culpability of Serbs as a whole in the actions
of the authoritarian government that rules them” (May 10). It was not explained
how they could tell the authoritarian
government that ruled them what to do.

This was the lead of a main story in The New York Times by Steven Lee Myers
and Elizabeth Becker:

WASHINGTON,
April 24—NATO began its second month of bombing against Yugoslavia today
with new strikes against military targets that disrupted civilian
electrical and water supplies, as the alliance’s leaders took steps to
expand the war effort, including an agreement to use air bases in
Hungary.”

Civilian drinking water and electricity were bombed
out, yet the targets were “military”!

Meeting in Washington, those
leaders celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, the story added. But it failed to mention NATO’ssupposedlydefensive purpose. This is from
Article 1 of the treaty (1949):

The parties undertake, as set forth in the
Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which
they may be involved by peaceful meansand to refrain in their international
relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the
purposes of the United Nations.

Contrarily, the organization had become an
aggressive war machine, unrestrained by the international law on which it was
supposedly based.

Many
news accounts in The New York Times
could have been written by U.S. government propagandists. Steven Erlanger
wrote, February 20:

Serbian
violations of that agreement [an unspecified agreement between Milosevic and
Holbrooke], including killings of ethnic Albanian civilians [no evidence cited]
have brought this latest crisis to a more decisive moment … .

In Belgrade, there was more fatigue
with Mr. Milosevic’s endless diplomatic games and crisis manipulations.

An exception was Erlanger’s February 24 piece, on
the negotiations over Kosovo and the controversy over an international force to
carry out a political settlement:

Mr. Milosevic has shown himself at
least as reasonable as the ethnic Albanians about a political settlement for
Kosovo … . Already the Serbian President, Milan Milutinovic,
has said that, when negotiations resume on March
15, the Serbs are ready to discuss “an international presence in Kosovo” to
carry out political arrangements of any agreement. And other Serbs have floated
ideas that include leavening Western forces with lots of Russians … .

Within a month, Erlanger apparently forgot all that.
His story headed “U.S. Negotiators Depart, Frustrated By
Milosevic’s Hard Line” presented just one side: U.S. officials’ talk of
Yugoslav intransigence (March 24). It said, incorrectly, that the Yugoslav
parliament had met “to reject the idea of foreign troops into Kosovo,” The
parliament had accepted exactly that. Although rejecting a U.S. proposal, it adopted a resolution declaring Yugoslavia “ready,
immediately after the signing of the political settlement about [Kosovo’s] self-
management … to consider the dimensions and character of the international
presence … for the implementation of such a settlement.”

Jane Perlez also erred in the Times (April 14): “Mr. Milosevic has absolutely refused to
entertain an outside force in Kosovo, arguing that the province is sovereign
territory of Serbia and Yugoslavia.”

To the contrary: on February 20, after two
months of talks at Rambouillet among the Yugoslavs,
ethnic Albanians, Americans, British, French, Germans, and Russians, the
Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reported that a compromise offer had been
floated: “a multinational force … under the UN or the OSCE flag rather than
the NATO flag as was planned before.” The Yugoslav delegation showed “signs
that it might accept international peacekeepers” for Kosovo from one of those
two bodies. But the next day, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, stated on
CNN, “The United States’ position is that it has to be a NATO-led force.”

What the Yugoslavs rejected was the
U.S. proposal for an occupation of the whole country, including all of Serbia
and Montenegro—not just Kosovo—by a hostile army, specifically 28,000 NATO
soldiers. The document handed to the Yugoslav government to sign—or
else—contained provisions like these:

7. NATO personnel shall be immune from
any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the
authorities in the FRY [Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia]… .

8. NATO personnel shall enjoy,
together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment,
free and unrestricted passage and access throughout
the FRY including associated airspace and territorial water … .9. NATO shall be exempt
from duties, taxes, and other charges and inspections and customs regulations… .

“They need some bombing”

The news media nearly all placed the blame for the
breakdown of negotiations on stubborn intransigence of the government in
Belgrade. The truth was otherwise. On May 18, Jim Jatras,
a foreign policy assistant to the Senate’s Republicans, said in a speech to the
Cato Institute in Washington that a senior administration official told the
news media at Rambouillet, “We intentionally set the
bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what
they’re going to get.”

A similar version appeared in The Nation on June 14. George Kenney, a
former State Department officer, said an unimpeachable press source who
regularly traveled with the secretary of state told Kenney a senior State
Department official had bragged that the U.S. “deliberately set the bar higher
than the Serbs could accept.” The official said the Serbs needed a little
bombing to see reason.

The correspondents, representing the major news
organizations, were sworn to “deep-background confidentiality.” So what they
knew and what they reported were far different.

In June 2000, Amnesty International
issued a postwar report accusing NATO of violating laws of war during its
bombing. The organization declared that NATO committed war crimes by air raids
that failed to distinguish between civilian and military targets and continued
even after it was obvious that civilians were being killed and wounded.

A little-known
report by Human Rights Watch in 2001 held the Kosovo Liberation Army
responsible for up to 1,000 “abductions and murders of Serbs and ethnic
Albanians considered collaborators with the state … widespread and systematic
burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs, Roma, and other minorities and
the destruction of Orthodox churches.” The place was Kosovo after Yugoslavia’s
defeat and withdrawal.

The U.S.-sponsored International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia refused to consider a complaint by
international human rights lawyers accusing NATO leaders of war crimes. Instead
it tried the head of the nation they ravaged.

In February 2002, Slobodan Milosevic
went on trial in The Hague, Netherlands, on 66 counts of war crimes in Bosnia,
Croatia, and Kosovo during civil wars of the 1990s. The trial dragged on for
four years, never to be concluded. In attempting to defend himself, Milosevic
tried futilely to detail American war crimes and the common support for Albanian
terrorists by Osama bin Laden and the U.S. He sought to compel Clinton, a
former friend, to testify. None of the defense arguments made the main news
media.

Suffering heart disease and high
blood pressure, Milosevic, 64, requested a trip to Russia for medical
treatment. After four months, in February 2006, the tribunal rejected his
request. The following month, Milosevic wrote that he was being poisoned, that
a “heavy drug” was found in his blood. Hours later he was dead.

A Dutch toxicologist found traces of
an unprescribed antibiotic in Milosevic’s system. The
Serbian president, Boris Tadic, held the tribunal
responsible for his death. Milosevic’s son, Marko, called it murder.

The news reports presented the
tribunal’s accusations as fact. ABC and NBC television news both called the
late defendant “the butcher of the Balkans.” USA Today editorialized, “A defendant is always innocent until
proven guilty,” yet it copied the “butcher of the Balkans” epithet and
convicted Milosevic of “ethnic brutality.” MSNBC said Milosevic faced charges
“after orchestrating a decade of bloodshed.” CNN.com headlined, “Milosevic:
Architect of Balkans carnage.” CBS radio news described “the dictator who
presided over ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.” ABC radio news resurrected the
genocide accusation and had Clinton’s envoy Holbrooke saying, “He killed
300,000 people.”